“Above the Age of 21 Years”: Age, Dependency, and Parental Assertions of Control in the Early Republic

In early republican America, a young person legally transformed into an adult – an independent individual capable of making their own decisions – at the age of twenty-one. This legal status defined by age through state statutes passed after the American Revolution was meant to redefine parent-child relationships and empower legal adults by severing expectations of perpetual deference to parents and guardians. Historians of the early republic have treated these codified definitions of age and life stage as inflexible fact and in turn have characterized the period following the American Revolution as a progressive march toward legally uniform and modern interpretations of childhood, age, and family relationships that we recognize today as standard. This paper challenges this narrative by arguing that legal definitions of age as they related to the experiences of young people and family relationships remained incredibly fluid, flexible, and circumstantial. As this paper will argue, a young person’s capability and dependence were negotiated within a family context regardless of the child’s chronological age. For example, Nelly Parke Custis Lewis and her husband promised their son Lorenzo a sizable inheritance at the age of twenty-three, two years after his legal adulthood, in order to extend their control over his actions. By looking at a number of seduction suits and loss of service cases tried and appealed in the first half of the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that the Lewises were not alone and, in fact, parents regularly challenged early republican legal definitions of age and independence. This paper sheds light on negotiations of power between elite, white parents and their children and adds to our understanding of how gender and age factored into “normative” legal definitions of independence at a critical moment in American legal and social development as a new nation.